I'm not sure I believe you, or maybe if nothing else maybe you got lucky or something. Between the couple of HP laptops I've had since college, and the ones my girlfriend has had since then (and her parents and all the dumbasses I know unfortunate enough to buy HP), I'm not sure I've ever seen an HP laptop (or anything since they spun off Agilent and decided to stop making actual useful tools) that wasn't an unrivaled clusterfuck from the moment someone had the misfortune of unboxing it. I mean from them doing stupid shit like using cheap end-of-the-waterfall Toshiba drives (lol if you think Seagate occasionally sells some duds, holy fuck do Toshiba HDDs suck), to skimping out on gold contacts for silver (lol oxidization), I wouldn't piss my time away on something in which these were considered "acceptable" trade-offs. If you've got something that's a true survivor I guess I'm legitimately amazed.

Having worked up from QA to firmware engineer at a couple companies that operate in the "hardware" side of things back when I got into tech industry, from everything I saw, it isn't just a meme that the "business" or "enterprise" grade stuff --be it a printer, laptop, or a hard drive-- is just expensive to be expensive; it's usually more expensive for a reason. I've got some friends that work in engineering at the HP plant not too far from where I live, and I bet if I ask them they'd tell you the same thing. I dislike the AppleMasterRace meme just as much as the next guy, but the $200 notebook usually features personally unbearable shit like a chiclet keyboard or potato level screen resolution, to speak nothing of the hardware packed inside, and the quality of subtle shit like the fasteners.

Everything is complete shit but not distinguishably shittier than the other except for the occasional company run by a muderer who puts poison in his products.

And after re-reading that, I just realized where I had heard this before, and it's usually from the people who buy the cheap stuff at Harbor Freight and then go on to make the claim that the Harbor Freight tools are exactly the same as your Mac or Snap-On tool, which usually more telling about the operator than the tool itself.

I guess if it works for you, lol go for it, I'm glad it makes you happy.

And you shouldn't expect anything else from a consumerist society which has laws to enforce consumerism. Even this thread is evidence of the cancer.

Wat. I think this thread just went full retard.